Star Wars Race in Warsaw

Long long time ago in the city of Warsaw...

...me, my friend Tomek and my brother Michał did this clip just to have some fun. But this wasn't the first I made. The story started a little bit earlier. This was second viral video in 'youtube career'. First one was simple film named 'how to make fake clips', and it got over 300k views 3 years after it was posted. It seems like it waited to be found :)

It's funny how the keying isn't to good and how the quality of bad camera is making everything more believable. And it's also nice to see a progress.

This video was my first attempt to make vfx. From this day I started to read, learn and practice, so after 3 years I could start my first job in vfx industry. After another 2 i made Star Wars Race in Warsaw, just to chill out after many commercial project I have worked on for a few years. (Time went by pretty fast).

This wasn't complex video, but there are some interesting things I can show you.

The hardest part of work was tracking the super noised footage - recorded at 1/250 shutter speed and 16k ISO. I have used PFTrack to accomplish it.

And here is how it looked inside PFTrack:

After having this done, we have focused on 3D work in 3Ds Max and vray. This part was covert by Tomek, who prepared few really nice looking passes for further compositing.

Compositing work was done in Nuke and After Effects. The first one helped with integrating render with footage, adjusting noises, adding shadows and fixing colors. After Effects gave me a hand with flares and final touches. Final setup wasn't complicated. Here is how it looked in both softwares:

The last thing left to do was ofcourse sound fx. I did it using Adobe Audition. I've used original pod racer sound from the Star Wars movies and combined it with Formula 1 sound. The whole thing took about 1 month of straight work to finish, and we were very happy with the result. It was viewed more than 350k times already.

Keep your fingers crossed, because tomorrow we will record footage for another viral, and something tells me this one will break 1 mln views :)